Abstract
In recent years, the need to enable location- and map-aware services in GPS-deprived environments has become increasingly important, especially after natural disasters events. At the same time, the possibility to form swarms of minirobots is a very attractive solution for users’ mobiles positioning and for mapping of position-related physical quantities, not only for outdoor but also for indoor scenarios, e.g., assessing the status of buildings immediately after an earthquake. In this context, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a good choice thanks to their flexibility, reconfigurability and advantageous line-of-sight propagation conditions. Despite UAVs’ potentials for indoor positioning, scholars and professionals have mostly considered and used them only for enabling outdoor applications. In this perspective, AirSens aims at analyzing the potentialities of swarms of UAVs for high-accuracy tracking and sensing in indoor contexts, by addressing three novel objectives: (1) the assessment of the swarms’ localization performance, even in infrastructure-less scenarios, by deriving the fundamental limits and considering energy-efficient solutions; (2) the investigation of swarms’ mapping capabilities, enhanced by crowd-sensing mechanisms; (3) the design of an informationseeking control for navigation (i.e., where the swarm should navigate to provide reliable position estimates) and formation (i.e., which specific swarm geometry can maximize the positioning performance). These objectives will be pursued through an innovative combination of theoretical and experimental analyses, possible thanks to the synergy between the researcher and her supervisors, experts in the fields of advanced signal processing (USA) and radio-localization (Italy), which perfectly matches the project vision. AirSens will also enhance the researcher technical and managerial skills thanks to multidisciplinary and ad-hoc training activities.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Davide Dardari
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Energia Elettrica e dell'Informazione "Guglielmo Marconi"
Coordinator:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Other Participants:
Stony Brook University
(United States of America)
Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 164.203,80
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
01/08/2018
End Date:
31/07/2020
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 793581